Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Kathy Fish, Wild Life: Collected Works: From 2003-2018

It’s Thanksgiving and you are six years old.
Your knee socks are pulled up over your kneecaps. Rusty, your Golden Retriever,
is under the table and now and then you drop a piece of turkey on the floor for
him. What you’d really like is a Tollhouse cookie or some muskmelon, cut into
chunks. You think Rusty’s distended stomach is from eating too much, though in
truth, he hardly eats at all. He won’t make it to Christmas and neither will
your father. Everyone knows this but you. (“Cancer Arm”)

SS: Your forthcoming book—Wild Life: Collected Works, 2003-2018—will gather over 15 years of
stories. Will they be sequenced chronologically? What kind of changes do you
see in your writing over that period?

KF: Thanks for asking about it, Sierra! The
stories are not in chronological order. They are sequenced more or less
thematically and in three separate sections of the book. And although they're
gathered from 15 years of writing I was pretty selective. It's still a very
slim volume!

I would say that my writing has gotten
subjectively better over the years, but that there are still some early stories
that I feel really proud of. And those are the ones that made the cut and are
included in the collection. I don't think I have the objectivity to really look
at my writing as a whole and say how it's changed.

The
strength of Fish’s work comes from a combination of insight, structural variety
and sheer lyric precision, managing to crawl inside a range of first person
points-of-view. Her stories explore a variety of shapes and styles, from the
more straightforward to the postcard-esque, and one of the highlights for me is
the quintet of short flash fictions grouped towards the end of the collection,
“Five Micros”: “Betsy Becomes A Point of Interest,” “Betsy Becomes an Artist,”
“Betsy Becomes the Subject of Meetings,” “Betsy Becomes a Pariah” and “Betsy
Becomes,” with the equally-short story “Space Man” immediately following, right
at the end of the collection, existing as a deceptively-placed coda-that-actually-isn’t
(which was a bit confusing on first reading):

His girlfriend’s probably surfing somewhere in
California right now. She is an astrophysicist and a veteran and a triathlete,
but she’s never been up in space, like he is now, in a failing spacecraft. He
knows it’s failing by the way the engine sounds, like a tennis shoe in a dryer,
and also, by the way it’s spiraling out of control. Alone and out loud, Space
Man employs the imperative: Eject! Eject!
And girding himself for the unknown, he presses the button. Untethered, he
waves to his ship as it cartwheels through space. As he, himself, cartwheels
through space. He squinches his eyes shut. Jane would tell him not to be
afraid, that this is an infinite universe and in an infinite universe all
things are mathematically possible, even certain. And so he imagines his pretty
girl, walking toward him on a boardwalk or even on Pluto or some star, a
surfboard under her arm, saying, See
Space Man? See?